Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

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This is horrifyingly incorrect. AOO still gets a shitload of downloads. It wasn't until last year that LO overtook AOO alone's download total.

You would be amazed. Ordinary people know MSO sucks and want a free alternative. "OpenOffice" is the name they've heard as their exit.

The project is entirely trading on the goodwill that FLOSS activists built up for the name "OpenOffice" from 2002-2010. That brand is still powerful!

So whatever you do, make sure everyone you know uses LO instead of AOO.

e.g. I wrote this last year for Tumblr. Target audience was writers and creative people who aren't geeks but just want to do their stuff. Written after I encountered yet another innocent user who'd just got AOO. Please excuse the apocalyptic tone, (1) that's how you write to catch attention on Tumblr, (2) this was during the six months they had a massive hole in the default install and were spending their time defending the product on blogs rather than fixing it:

http://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/128873352708/urgent-get-t...

You might be interested in my impressions as somebody who hardly ever uses office software, but an open source enthusiast and keeps up with some tech news.

I was aware of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice split of course. I knew this would mean some confusion until the dust settles. My vague impression was that LibreOffice might be a better choice for supporting openness versus corporate ownership (and so I'd plumbed for that myself) but at the same time I worried that OpenOffice might end up being better managed and maintained than LibreOffice. I was not aware until I read this, that the dust was settling so comprehensively on the side of LibreOffice. More than just OS idealists buying into it, it's actually being maintained a lot better.

This is good news. The situation seems a lot clearer than previously, but yes the message needs to get out. Hopefully apache will shut down, redirect and facilitate re-merging the brand names.

The best way to update your acquaintances would be to tell them "The program has been upgraded and renamed to LibreOffice. OpenOffice is now the old, unmaintained version."

It's all true - from a certain point of view, and it transfers the trust on the software from the old brand to the new, without having to delve too much in the conflict that motivated the fork.

MSO is closed, proprietary, whatever, but it's actually a fine piece of software especially compared to OO and LO. Word, PowerPoint and Excel are so good that people end up overusing them for stuff they're not intended to. Others like OneNote or Visio are extremely useful, too. They might not be the best on each category, but together it's a very powerful suite.

Plus, MSO is multiplatoform on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. I'm unaware of mobile versions of OO or LO.

Everyone I know, including myself, that uses OO or LO is because it's free (as in freedom for some, as in beer for others) and can read/write MSO files to an extent.

Is LO for Android not out yet? It feels like they have been talking about it for years...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.documentfo...

AFAIK, it also has an experimental editing mode. Yes, from what I've seen, development on it is slow.

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